This week Michelle Young’s quest for justice was brought to a deeply personal, if not final, conclusion. In Court Number 41 in the High Court on Wednesday, her self-styled property tycoon husband, Scot Young, was sent to jail for contempt of court.

Over four years he had consistently failed to produce documents asked for by the courts. He provided no evidence of where his once-considerable capital had gone, how he supports himself, or why he should not pay his wife and their two daughters the maintenance ordered by the court in 2009. After almost four years of legal warfare in which he has represented himself, Mr Young, a fixer to Russian oligarchs, was condemned to a prison sentence which will only be remitted if he fulfils all judicial requirements.

Soundly reprimanded by Mr Justice Moor, Mr Young sat as the judge outlined in minute detail his continuing failure to produce documents or “any evidence” that the capital his wife believes he has hidden (the figure has risen from £400 million to £2 billion) had disappeared in a deal he referred to for the first time as “Project Moscow”. Clearly irritated, the judge noted: “You have answered 'I don’t know,’ or 'I don’t remember,’ or, 'You will have to ask some-one else’ to every question.”

Mr Young, 51, is now indebted to his wife and two daughters for “almost a million” in back payments of maintenance orders first set out in 2009. His abject failure to produce any adequate statements showing where his money was, is, or might have been channelled is why he was committed to Belmarsh prison for a six-month custodial sentence.

As the tipstaff slipped silently into the back of the courtroom before the judgment had been read out, it was as though Mr Young’s fate had come up from behind and tapped him on the shoulder. He was still unsure whether he would wake next morning in a prison cell with a warder as his companion, or with his girlfriend, Noelle Reno, an elegant blonde who was sitting in the back row.

“It’s a shock,” Mr Young said several times, but there was his equally elegant, padlocked Louis Vuitton black bag, packed and ready for an uncomfortable stay.

“We began to think it might happen last night,” Ms Reno, 29, told me later. “When he came home from court he was quite confident, but at about four in the morning he began making arrangements.”

It was the second time a judge had thought fit to condemn him for contempt of court, but as Justice Moor clearly explained, this time there would be no further mercy, no suspended sentence, no further 28 days for him to produce documents.

Mr Young was handcuffed as he tried to make conversation with a stony-faced guard. After a glassy stare at his wife, an awkward kiss on the lips for Ms Reno and a dour “bad day for British Justice” muttered to anyone who would listen, he was marched out of court.

So far in this tawdry affair there have been no winners, only victims. In the summer of 2011 Mrs Young was taken seriously ill. Mr Young has been sectioned twice under the Mental Health Act. Their daughters have had their schooling curtailed – both left Francis Holland School early, with £30,000 of fees unpaid – and their adolescence brutally disrupted.

Scarlet, 20, and Sasha, 18, must now assimilate the fact that their father is not only unwilling or unable to support them, but is also a jailbird. To see him they will have to visit Belmarsh, where he will stay for six months unless he comes up with documents demanded by the court.

He has asked to make an emergency application to the judge, but it is unlikely he will be able to do much from prison.

“So why are you still married?” I had asked him the day before.

“Why indeed?” he shrugged. “It’s in Michelle’s hands. We haven’t lived together for six years. She has to apply for the divorce and she won’t. Why is she trying to commit me to prison? The motivation is punishment, extremely personal to her. Sending me to prison will not advance her position one jot, in fact it will do the opposite.”

Mrs Young, 48, is determined to stay married until “it all is all settled”, or at least until she gets the money she feels she is owed. “My daughters have lost their education; we have moved five times in four years; I share a room with my daughter; we are living in complete limbo. I don’t want to go through all this for nothing. I want to see the law changed to protect women like me with children by men who conveniently find they suddenly have no assets when they want to go off with younger women. This isn’t the end. There’ll be more hearings and the final judgment will come in October.’”

Ms Reno thinks Mrs Young is driven to either win the battle or destroy her husband because she became used to an opulent lifestyle, with palatial homes all over the world, funded by Mr Young – and was never self-sufficient. “She is not just afraid of not having enough money, but also of not having any money,” she claims.

So Michelle and Scot Young are still legally married, stuck in a war of attrition, each waiting for the other to blink. They battle over maintenance money, child support, his passport (still held by the court) and his civil liberty. In 2011 she was convinced he would “go down” and hired the ferocious barrister Deborah Bangay, famed for achieving a record-breaking settlement for footballer Ray Parlour’s wife. But she was blocked from asking for committal proceedings until after the final hearing and told me then: “I am disappointed Scot Young has not gone to prison for contempt of court and that me and the girls must struggle on until we get a judgment.”

Many women will sympathise with her. Even while pleading penury, Mr Young was pulling wads of cash out of his pocket – £250 as he stood in court – and sending cash in brown envelopes in a taxi to his daughter on her birthday. Mrs Young accuses him of still living the high life because he is often seen, and photographed, at the Ivy and the Cipriani with his girlfriend.

Mr Young described Ms Reno, a television presenter and designer, as “my girlfriend, my fiancée, my future wife”, but when I ask if she thinks she would marry him, she says: “I might be a very very old woman by then. I put up with all this negativity because I love him and I support him financially and emotionally.”

She admits to lending him money, and has allowed the court access to her own Barclays Bank statements. “Why not?” she asks. “I have nothing to hide.”

The couple met three years ago “through mutual friends”. She protects him staunchly, arguing that he puts on a good face and is too proud to let people know how stressful his life has become. In court he may appear confident and articulate, she says, but the reality is that he was detained under the Mental Health Act over Christmas and New Year in St Charles’ Hospital, an NHS hospital near Ladbroke Grove. He was sectioned and put on medication before being allowed out.

In court, Mr Young claimed his wife had had detectives following him. Certainly, she has had lawyers of every kind and “forensic accountants” investigating her husband’s business dealings and personal life for at least the past three years.

As I left Ms Reno, ringing Mr Young’s parents and friends on his two mobile phones, it struck me how eerily similar the two woman are. Not just their telephones and the constant texting, but the slim frames, tumbling hair, sharp black suits and careful make-up. There might be a gap of 19 years in age between them, but they both lead their lives in the shadow of the same once-powerful man who could in the end bring them both down.